Software Engineer II

At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.

About the Role:

The Search Backend team is at the heart of the Compass Engineering organization, driving the search capabilities across our suite of real estate tools. This team is responsible for ingesting listing data and providing it through REST APIs that serve various front-end components on our website and mobile apps, as well as other Backend services which rely on listing search results. Their work encompasses everything from finding and paginating listings to sorting, clustering, and boosting search results, both in list and map views.

We're creating a cutting-edge platform to introduce numerous game-changing products and features for real estate agents. Joining the Search Backend team means playing a pivotal role in enhancing an already impressive product. You'll contribute to platform development, improving search quality, enhancing accuracy, boosting performance, and optimizing costs.

As an engineer on the Search Backend team, you’ll work on both infrastructure-focused and product-facing projects. You’ll contribute to areas like real-time search APIs, relevance tuning, and interactive map-based search experiences. The ideal candidate combines backend engineering depth with curiosity about the product experience.

At Compass, You Will:

• Build, develop, and scale the platform that empowers real estate professionals, buyers, and sellers.


• Become a domain expert in real estate technology, serving as an empathetic partner to our customers.


• Optimize performance and cost of listing ingestion and retrieval pipelines.


• Collaborate cross-functionally to build new search experiences across mobile and web.


• Inspire, recruit, and mentor fellow engineers, and contribute to a culture of technical excellence and learning.


• Operate within a scalable engineering culture that leverages modern principles of distributed systems and automated CI/CD/testing/monitoring to drive efficiency.

What We Look For:

• BS or MS in CS or EE, or equivalent.


• A track record as a technical leader with teamwide impact.


• 4+ years of experience developing comprehensive, well-tested, and high-performance search applications.


• 4+ years of programming experience in languages such as Java, Python, and Go (we utilize all three at Compass).


• Experience designing and extending large-scale search systems, including RESTful APIs, microservice architectures, data ingestion methods, and search methodologies.


• Experience in fine-tuning performance and using data to optimize end-to-end latency and system behavior.


• Understanding and adherence to industry-standard best practices in software development and architecture.


• In-depth knowledge and hands-on experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.


• Familiarity with AWS services, including Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, EKS, S3, Redis, Lambda, and MSK.

Compensation: The base pay range for this position is $131,000-$197,000; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of benefits. Base pay is based on market location. Minimum wage for the position will always be met.

Perks that You Need to Know About:

Participation in our incentive programs (which may include eligible cash, equity, or commissions). Plus paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave; medical, tele-health, dental and vision benefits; 401(k) plan; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); commuter program; life and disability insurance; Maven (a support system for new parents); Carrot (fertility benefits); UrbanSitter (caregiver referral network); Employee Assistance Program; and pet insurance.

Do your best work, be your authentic self.

At Compass, we believe that everyone deserves to find their place in the world — a place where they feel like they belong, where they can be their authentic selves, where they can thrive. Our collaborative, energetic culture is grounded in our Compass Entrepreneurship Principles and our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, growth and mobility. As an equal opportunity employer, we offer competitive compensation packages, robust benefits and professional growth opportunities aimed at helping to improve our employees' lives and careers.